April 24, 2010

9 comments:

Ah, the joys of academic life, and productivity. Most fields have an idea of what is a reasonable research output load by discipline. For instance, in psychiatry, 2 -- 4 papers a year is doing OK, but in clinical psychology one paper every two years is also OK. In physical chemistry, 20 papers a year is about right. (for the pedants, I mean peer reviewed).

Since I am an academic psychiatrist, my professional priorities -- I put the family before these things -- are my patients, teaching, then research. Research can include contributing to scholarly web pages. In the British Commonwalth, it is not how many papers you have published, but how good and influential are the papers you have published. (In NZ, you submit only four -- no more -- papers for your research grade).

But this varies. Prof Dutton, four hours up the road, runs Arts and letters. A fair amount of the work he does there has become part of his book.

Ann blogs on law and life. I tend to not blog on mental health, but on life: my blog is therefore pseudonymous. But I would not submit it as a research output, and tend to write it at home.

``Example: A giant program is to Conquer Cancer is begun. At the end of five years, cancer has not been conquered, but one thousand research papers have been published. In addition, one million copies of a pamphlet entitled ``You and the War Against Cancer'' have been distributed. Those publications will absolutely be regarded as Output rather than Input.''

Since I dont have tenure and don't have to subscribe to the "productivity" aspects of my university, I am not much interested in how each school defines productivity. I agree with Chris that YMMV as to productivity.

Blogging is a new phenomena which, IMO, the classic academic journals are less relevant than they were, say 20 years ago. My guess is that the staid academic definitions are not particularly relevant in 2010. Let the market decide, and with any luck, the journals, and their supporters in academe will come around.

Knowledge is knowledge and the format (journal publications) is much less relevant than it was in the recent past.